A Muslim poet who tweeted about the mistreatment and mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province was reportedly detained.
The poet, identified as Cui Haoxin, was reportedly placed under criminal detention on Jan. 24 for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” Radio Free Asia (RFA)’s Uyghur service reported.
Cui, a Hui Muslim from Shandong province in eastern China, had previously been detained over critical tweets in 2018. He was also briefly detained for writings that referenced the situation in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities are being held in internment camps.
In April 2018, he was sent on a week-long “reeducation course.”
RFA reports it is unclear what triggered Cui’s latest detention, although critical social media posts regarding the situation in Xinjiang are believed to be the reason.
On Jan. 12, Cui posted about a Hui Muslim woman locked up in an internment camp in Xinjiang, tweeting: “There are about one million Hui Muslims in #Xinjiang.”
He added that he himself had barely avoided being sent to one such camp.
He also referred to a friend’s post concerning the destruction of mosques in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture in the western province of Gansu. His friend was then told by authorities to remove that post from social media.
“There are several hundred mosques and facing the destruction on the large scale. One day, he sadly saw the scene and shot it. After he share the video on Wechat, he soon received the call of political police,” Cui tweeted.
He added: “[The] Xinjiang model is not a distant rumor. Muslim minorities live in the surveillance and fear.”
Watch this 2018 report on Cui by AP.
